Coyotes have lived in the East since the 1930s, and recent genetic tests have shown they are actually a mixture of coyote, wolf and dog …

The Eastern coyote is one of 19 subspecies of coyote, which are adaptable predators that live everywhere from the streets of Los Angeles to Florida swamps.

The Eastern subspecies, which ranges as far west as Ohio, is thought to have migrated to the Northeast some 80 years ago, taking over the range occupied by wolves and interbreeding with the larger animals.

They no longer overlap with wolves, which are long gone from the East save for the very rare red wolf, but they remain eight to 25 percent wolf genetically, said Roland Kays, a leading coyote biologist with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

They are also about eight to 11 percent dog due to past interbreeding with feral dogs, he said.

The point of all of this is that we have a new breed of very adaptable, very smart canine in the land, one that isn’t scared of humans, may be rabid, and knows how to survive virtually anywhere.

Do you carry guns with you? I do. If threatened, you can’t shoot them if you don’t carry guns.

Bolt action rifle in .223, 6.5 Creedmoor or .308, some very nice features, and MSRP $1519. It’s strange though, because I don’t see an optic rail on the picture, and optics are not even discussed in the article.

I don’t get the impression that anyone who builds guns for >= $3000 per item thinks that there is a big market for them. They must be marketing to law enforcement, which necessitates a huge margin and markup since quantity will be much lower.

This doesn’t impress me as a winning strategy for a company in today’s climate. But that’s just me. Only one of these rifles is affordable my me or many of my readers.

Remington Outdoor Company Inc., of Ilion, has reached out to banks and other agencies to seek financing to file for bankruptcy, according to Reuters.

The company is working with an investment bank to restructure its $950 million in debt.

Remington has not officially filed for bankruptcy yet.

There have been no immediate plans to shut down, Reuters says.

Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, who represents Herkimer County, issued the following statement:

“Remington Arms is an iconic business in our region that has employed generations of families for over two hundred years. Remington is one of our nation’s longest continuously operating manufacturing facilities. Unfortunately, economic downturns in the firearms industry and outstanding debt have forced Remington’s parent company to seek new credit options and financing through bankruptcy protection. In addition to volatility, Governor Cuomo’s anti-Second Amendment policies have negatively impacted Remington’s Ilion production facility. I have been a strong supporter of Remington Arms and its hardworking employees. My office will continue to offer support to Remington and the families impacted during this difficult time.”

This is tough. It’s difficult to see how Remington pulls out of this. $950M is an awful lot of money for a firearms manufacturer.

I don’t know what the future holds for Remington, but it would have been better to have dealt with the issues that were the possible root causes of this long ago: [1] reliance on government contracts, [2] ensconcing in an anti-gun state, [3] reliance on union labor, and [4] lethargy in dealing with the Walker fire control system problems.

CMMG’s MkG Guard pistol-caliber rifle is now safety certified to shoot the potent 450 SMC cartridge, according to a recent CMMG press release.

The CMMG MkG Guard is an AR15-style rifle for chambered in .45 ACP and features a Radial Delayed Blowback operating system that works to harness the strong recoil impulse of .45 ACP.

Pistol-caliber carbines and rifles are becoming increasingly popular in the shooting community.

For those unfamiliar with 450 SMC, Triton first conceived the cartridge in 2001 and is essentially a magnum version of .45 ACP that offers ballistics comparable to 10mm.

“It is a true stopper that delivers energy capable of taking down big game,” the release states.

For example, the 450 SMC 185 grain Bonded Defense jacketed hollow point round will produce a muzzle velocity of 1,725 feet per second and 1,223 foot pounds of energy out of a 16 inch barrel, the release states.

While the 450 SMC uses a case with the same outer dimensions as .45 ACP, there are a few significant differences that allow DoubleTap Ammunition to load 450 SMC with five to six thousand pounds per square inch of pressure more than a standard .45ACP, according to the release.

First, the 450 SMC uses a small magnum rifle primer instead of the large pistol primer. This modification allows the hardened case to be thicker at the base. Second, the brass is manufactured from the ground up to handle up to 30,000 pounds of pressure. The result is a dual-purpose cartridge that is exceptional for both hunting and personal defense.

While 450 SMC can be safely run in any .45 ACP that is rated for +P ammunition, the amount of rearward force created by such a hot load would potentially be problematic from a straight blowback AR15, the release states. But the CMMG’s Radial Delayed Blowback operating system allows the Guard to handle the potent load, CMMG officials maintain.

The RDB system uses up some of the recoil impulse of the spent round to unlock the rotating bolt from the barrel extension. This mitigates the leftover rearward force that then drives the carrier back to cycle the action.

By eliminating some of this rearward force during the unlocking sequence, the Guard requires less weight in the bolt carrier group and buffer to safely cycle, which will result in less felt recoil for the shooter, CMMG officials maintain.

I won’t get 1725 FPS out of my shorter barrel, but by using the 450 SMC cartridge I should see an improvement of 200-300 FPS over the .45 ACP based on what I’ve read. I also wrote tech support at CMMG to verify that their position holds not just for their carbine, but for the AR pistol as well. It does.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (WBTV) — It’s been a difficult week for parents Temia Hairston and Michael Grace Sr. Their son, Michael Grace Jr., was shot and killed during an attempted robbery early Sunday morning.

Police said Grace Jr. and two other people tried to rob a Pizza Hut in the 3200 block of Freedom Drive. During the incident, an employee fired his own handgun and killed Grace Jr.

Hairston said she learned of her son’s death on social media, and only got confirmation from police after contacting them first. The grieving mother said she has been left with dozens of questions about the situation that have thus far gone unanswered.

“If there was to be a death, it was not the place of the employee at Pizza Hut. That is the place of law enforcement,” said Hairston.

Hairston and Grace Sr. acknowledged that their son was breaking the law by robbing the business, and said they definitely don’t condone what he did.

“It was an act of desperation, but I do not believe that Michael would have hurt anyone,” said Hairston.

They said Grace Jr. had fallen on hard times and resorted to crime to provide for his own child. They also said their son used to work at the same Pizza Hut restaurant where the robbery happened. They maintain he never would have physically hurt anyone during the robbery.

WBTV contacted the local restaurant and the Pizza Hut corporation public relations line. Neither have confirmed that Grace Jr. worked as an employee at the Freedom Drive Pizza Hut. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officials have not confirmed the information either.

The parents are angry that their son was shot and killed by an employee. They don’t believe the full story has been released to the public.

“Why in the hell did this guy have a gun?” questioned Hairston about the employee who shot her son.

Well, that’s right. Criminals do indeed have rights, guaranteed under the constitution. And Tennessee versus Garner says that police cannot discharge their weapons in order to stop a non-violent offense or to stop a fleeing suspect (as that would be an end-around of the right of due process), and only in the defense of their persons or other persons.

The problem, Ms. Hairston, is that we can only assume that your son had a gun and brandished it and used it to threaten others. In this case, the employee was entirely within his rights of self defense in shooting the armed assailant. Brandishing a weapon and making threats is called assault with a deadly weapon, whether the weapon is discharged or not.

You see, if there was to be a death that night, it could have been prevented by you son deciding on a wiser course of action, to wit, not assaulting someone with a deadly weapon. It isn’t the job of the police to perform or conduct executions. They’ve gotten too good at that already. Let’s not feed the monster, okay?

I want to cover this ground one more time for good measure. The lawmakers in South Carolina are toying with constitutional carry, and this is a small step forward for liberty, but the largest step has yet to be taken and is still opposed by the power brokers in South Carolina. Open carry.

Please realize that as gun owners, you’ve been conditioned to be embarrassed and ashamed of the fact that you own and carry weapons. What was once considered poor taste, ill-bred and even criminal, hiding your weapons, is now required of you in order to keep them out of sight of all of the offended parties.

You’ve been taught that all of your gun owning life. You have holsters for concealed carry. Instructors and trainers are there to teach you to draw and present from concealment. You know all of the applicable laws on concealed carry for your state. There are entire posts and videos on carrying in non-permissive environments. It’s even in vogue for the gun community to criticize open carry and viciously attack open carriers, with largely irrelevant and ridiculous notions of tactical advantages on concealment. Those advantages, as you know, cannot be demonstrated to be advantages with any statistical significance that meets the Central Limit Theorem. Finally, the tactical advantages of open carry, which is quicker draw and presentation, is largely ignored in these conversations.

Comfort is largely irrelevant to the conversation, as is the fact that you’re sweating and dirtying your weapon with IWB carry. All of these things are signs and symptoms of the fact that gun owners have been taught by society to respond like dogs or other pets by “operant conditioning.” The first time you ever openly carried caused you some degree of self consciousness, didn’t it? Just go ahead and admit it. It’s useful to demonstrate my point.

Gun owners, and in particular open carriers, are treated like second class citizens, inferior men, uncouth savages, like those who have no etiquette, when exactly the opposite would have been true two hundred years ago. That’s one reason I openly carry when I can. In some small way I want to change all of this. I open carry “For the peace, good and dignity of the country and the welfare of its people.” So should you.

Early evaluations of the Army’s new handgun, the M17, last year showed test failures when the pistol was fired with the standard ball ammunition, stoppages, and double ejections.

Those findings were revealed in a recently published report by the Defense Department’s Office of the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation. The office reviews major programs across the Defense Department.

[ … ]

The Pentagon report noted the following problems:

Double ejections of an unspent ball ammunition round along with a spent round during firing.

A higher number of stoppages experienced by shooters with both the XM17 and XM18 handguns when fired with ball ammunition as compared to the special purpose ammunition.

Both weapons failed to meet the Mean Rounds Between Stoppage reliability requirement with ball ammunition.

Two trigger-splintering incidents that officials believe were related to an engineering change made by Sig Sauer to correct a drop test deficiency in which testers saw the weapon fire when dropped.

More than half of the stoppages reported were likely caused by use of the Army Marksmanship Unit’s “high pistol grip” method, which can result in the shooter engaging the slide catch lever and cause the slide not to lock in the rear position.

As for not being able to shoot FMJ lead ball, that seems like a real problem. Double ejections are also a big problem, and firing when dropped makes this firearm completely unacceptable. Funny, this. I never have any problems with any of these things or any other failures with my 1911s, or with my new CMMG .45 ACP AR pistol. I just won’t accept failures. It’s a machine, and it can be designed and fabricated properly (although I’ll have to say that it’s hard to beat what John Moses Browning did and I don’t think anybody has even come close yet).

Here is the right way to roll out new software.[1] Set functional requirements, [2] programmers go to work, [3] put high end users in a room with it and tell them to break it, [4] repeat parts [2] and [3] until no more breakages. Only after this do you roll it out to the user community.

The Army should have taken this approach prior to selecting a new pistol. This must be embarrassing for them. It should be.

The biennial report of the U.N. Secretary General on Small Arms and Light Weapons, issued in December, leaves little doubt about activists’ priority for 2018: to have ammunition included in the PoA, even though ammunition already has its own instrument, the harmless International Ammunition Technical Guidelines.

The impracticality of focusing on a consumable commodity like ammunition, of which tens of billions of rounds are produced annually, will not deter the activists.

The PoA is also likely to return to an obsession with marking and tracing modular firearms — such as the AR type of firearm popular in the U.S. — and with polymer (i.e. plastic) and 3-D printed firearms. These are, at best, niche issues, if they are issues at all.

What the PoA is guaranteed not to do is to eliminate the exemption that allows China to leave its firearms unmarked in any meaningful way, thereby making them nearly impossible to trace.

Getting rid of the Chinese exemption would be a genuinely useful step, but the PoA is not about doing useful things. The best the U.S. can do, therefore, is to try and ensure that the PoA does nothing at all. The U.S. certainly cannot agree to any obligation to do the impossible by tracing every bullet it produces.

The ATT conference in August, fortunately, should be less fraught. The treaty is now, on its own terms, an obvious failure — nations are not paying their dues or filing required reports. The only thing left for the U.S. to do is for President Trump to ‘unsign’ it, and leave those nations that wish to keep on pretending to take it seriously to pay for their meetings on their own.

But just because the ATT is accomplishing nothing useful doesn’t mean the U.N.’s efforts are having no impact on the U.S. The most disturbing thing I learned at the SHOT Show was that U.S. importers were having increasing difficulties — which they linked directly to the United Nations.

One firm which relies on imports of parts from India found that New Delhi — acting under the guidance of the International Small Arms Control Standards, yet another mischievous U.N. initiative — had impounded an entire shipment worth millions of dollars, on the grounds that these parts had to be controlled under a technical definition that India did not understand and which those who did found close to meaningless.

Other nations will no longer ship arms to the U.S. — even to the U.S. government.

Another firm that imports firearms from southeastern Europe now has only one reliable route off the continent — from Slovenia to Austria to the German port of Hamburg. Many shipping firms departing from European ports will no longer take cargoes of arms — even when all export and transit licenses are in order — and even proper licenses do not always prevent cargoes from being seized en route. These problems began to appear after the ATT, which requires controls on the transit of arms, entered into force.

Activists will no doubt celebrate these developments as victories. They should think again. As shipping by sea becomes harder, legitimate firms will be forced to turn to air freight — which offers an easier route for the unscrupulous.

If southeastern Europe does not sell its firearms to the U.S., those arms will find their way to conflicts in Africa or the Middle East.

And as it becomes harder to import parts and components, U.S. manufacturers will source domestically — as, indeed, they are already starting to do.

I’m not entirely sure I understand this commentary by Ted, whom I’ve found to be a good researcher. If I’m not mistaken he is suggesting that the UN agreement, which apparently we’ve signed, is making it hard to import parts into America for the building of firearms. If this happens to ammunition too, it will throttle the flow to users.

Okay, if this is the point, I’ve got it, and competition is always a good thing. But I’ve got to believe that in the total absence of imports for parts – whether guns or ammunition – American manufacturers would step up their game. That might in fact lead to an increase in prices too.

Bottom line: you don’t have enough ammunition, right now or in the future. Neither do I.

My 3-year-son Tener is sitting at the dining room table, coloring next to his big sister. “What are you drawing, Ten?” I ask, while staring into my screen. “A gun,” he replies, not looking up. “Oh, that’s nice,” I say, relatively unfazed by his creative choice.

His sister smirks at me. She remembers how not long ago, I would’ve maybe tried to redirect either one of them if they’d been talking, playing, or even drawing guns.

But in truth, the question of whether or not to allow my kids to play “guns” is not something I had to think much about until the past couple of years. When kids on the playground would play guns, my daughter would find something else to do. It just wasn’t of interest. But almost as soon as my son could speak, “gun” was on the tip of his tongue. He wanted to play with the other kids who were playing guns. He’d lose his mind if someone had a toy gun to play with because he wanted it for himself.

He has a few weapons at home — a wooden sword from the Renaissance Festival, a lightsaber he got for Christmas, and tons of superhero costumes — the same as his big sister. But intentionally, I had never bought any toy guns or allowed them in our home when he asked. To me, it felt wrong and dangerous to turn gun violence — a very real and serious issue, especially in America — into a game. I fiercely believe that we need common-sense gun control laws in our country. Nearly every time we flip on the news, there’s another mass shooting. How could I, in good conscience, allow that kind of play?

Regardless of the fact that we kept guns out of our home, and my son didn’t play violent video games or watch frightening stuff on TV, his interest still budded on its own. If he went to a friend’s house, he’d go straight for their Nerf guns and hold on tight until I picked him up. He’d shoot me dead with his pointer finger while I sat on the couch and then laugh at a job well done. For the record, he’d also shoot “fire” at me, burning me to the ground, or defeat me in just about any way he enjoyed. But shooting remained of high interest, too.

According to the book, studies showed that in British preschools when kids were allowed to play with toy guns, their games became more aggressive in the short-term, but that they were actually more relaxed later in the day. So playing fantastical games didn’t impact kids negatively or make them more aggressive. You could even say that they got their aggression out by having the freedom to play how they chose.

Some studies have suggested that watching violent shows or playing violent video games encourages violent behavior (not just play), but high amounts of screen time no matter the content, has been shown to have the same result. And it’s no surprise that context matters, too. If kids have a violent home life, their violent tendencies go up. But if they have safe surroundings and are simply playing these kinds of games, they remain just that — games.

Sarah is a feminist and that probably has a lot to do with how she’s interpreting the response of her son and what she chooses to do about it. Her world and life view affects her actions and perspectives, as it does with us all.

But try as she might, she cannot construct a value system that can make any sense of this. The term aggression is there, but what causes it remains unexplained. Why poor parenting can have a negative effect on children is just taken as an axiom. She just decides to let it happen, and it appears to me that she has found justification for all of this as opposed to being unable to stop it and also unable to find justification. If it’s going to happen regardless of what I do, then I may as well justify it, she apparently thinks.

So let me help a little, Sarah. Getting aggression “out of his system” isn’t why he needs to behave like a boy instead of a girl. Evil exists in the world. We aren’t a tabula rasa, or a blank tablet, and we do have predilections and propensities, regardless of what the nineteenth and twentieth century idiot philosophers told you.

You want to teach your children well. We don’t learn to drive in driver’s education. Boys learn to drive by watching their fathers, and girls by watching their mothers. Our children generally take on our own value system, at least initially, but there are still God-given tendencies in boys and girls that will always be different.

You will want to turn your boy’s predilections towards good. He wants to learn to protect and provide because that’s the way he is wired, no matter what your feminist friends and professors have taught you. He can use his predilections for evil, but you want him to learn the good.

You don’t want your little boy to grow up to be a man who cowers in a corner when hard times hit and a loved one or neighbor is under threat. If he does this, he will hate himself later in life and feel worthless, and even worse, an impediment to the good. You don’t want your little boy to grow up to hate himself, do you?

You want better than that for your little boy. You want him to grow up to be a man, not a unisex, genderless robot. A man is what God designed him to be, and it’s your job to assist in that calling. So your husband, if you have one, has a job to do with him. Tell your husband to get busy hunting, fishing, shooting, camping, hiking, biking, and doing all of the things a man should do with his boy. It’s what God wants.

If you have no husband, then you’re going to have to pull double-duty. But your son is worth it, yes?